Vibratory conveyors, and especially excited frame vibratory conveyors have been employed in a wide variety of industry segments for a number of decades. Excited frame vibratory conveyors have a significant presence in the food processing industry and where such conveyors have been utilized to handle fragile food products such as potato chips, coated food products, and the like. As should be understood excited frame conveyors avoid the problems associated with other conveyors which cause adverse, and undesirable movement or tumbling of the food products. This type of movement causes damage to the food product or the loss of food coatings that have been deposited on the food products.
While vibratory conveyors of the type described, above have found wide-spread acceptance, and use, in assorted industry segments, those industries employing excited frame conveyors have long known about environments where such devices have had performance problems which have detracted from their usefulness. For example, those skilled in the art have long recognized that various problems arise when excited frame conveyors are deployed which have extremely long vibratory bed lengths. When such excited frame conveyors are employed, difficulties are often encountered in starting (energizing), and stopping (de-energizing) such vibratory conveyors because such long vibratory conveyor beds often tend to move in somewhat erratic fashions as the vibratory conveyor bed moves or accelerates through various resonant vibratory frequencies during the ramping-up (accelerating) and the ramping-down of the vibratory speed of the conveyor bed. This adverse movement may include, but is not limited to, side-to-side motion, and/or up and down motion, which can cause a needless amount of stress, strain and twisting motion which is imparted to the elongated conveyor springs that are employed to support the vibratory conveyor bed while it is in motion.
While various methodology and arrangements have been developed through the years, to avoid the adverse movement normally expected in longer length excited frame conveyor beds, designers of such machines have looked for other means for reducing or eliminating the adverse movement of these longer conveyor beds in order to provide greater reliability and decreased maintenance costs for excited frame conveyor beds of this type of design.
The present invention provides a vibratory conveyor which avoids the detriments associated with the prior art devices and practices utilized heretofore by employing a novel conveyor bed driving assembly which substantially eliminates the problems associated with the ramping-up (energizing) and the ramping-down (de-energizing) of the vibratory conveyor bed during routine operations.